


Synonyms for Disaster

by SpaceTimeConundrum



Series: Rhymes With There-Wolf [2]
Category: due South
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Divorce, F/M, Frankly A Lot of Swearing, M/M, Not Talking About It, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25821961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceTimeConundrum/pseuds/SpaceTimeConundrum
Summary: Angry skinny Polish werewolf detectives from Chicago with experimental hair.
Relationships: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski, Ray Kowalski/Stella Kowalski
Series: Rhymes With There-Wolf [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1873561
Comments: 12
Kudos: 37





	Synonyms for Disaster

**Author's Note:**

> This is the other half of _Pack as a Metaphor_ that I didn't know I needed to write, but I did.

Ray Kowalski was good at undercover, he’d been doing it all his life, really.

Growing up a skinny Polish kid with glasses and a name like ‘Stanley’ on Chicago’s South Side, he’d learned real early on that the best way to avoid getting the shit kicked out of you on a regular basis was to pretend to be something you’re not. A little swagger, the right amount of attitude at the right time, add in a willingness to fight dirty and ditch the glasses, and a guy could earn himself a reputation. Make even somebody who had six inches and a good forty pounds on you rethink a confrontation because shit, maybe Kowalski is that crazy, didja hear what he did to Jeremy?

Hell, it’d been a lie that’d gotten him the Stella, after all.

It didn’t work with everyone; his dad still wasn’t talking to him since he’d graduated from the Academy, and even Stella didn’t seem so impressed these days.

Still, the Chicago Police Department had recognised his talents at least, giving him his shield and a string of undercover assignments when he worked Vice, and now, Major Crimes. Wasn’t like the jobs were much of a stretch, acting-wise. The key to any good undercover op was to blend; you wanted to be the guy nobody gives a shit about, useful enough to keep around, but not anybody important really, not memorable. Guys like half the kids he grew up with, working class Joes, shitheads, junkies, small time crooks looking to score some cash, whoever he needed to be to get the information they needed to close the case.

Usually it was pretty straightforward, get in, do his thing, get out, and let the uniforms and surveillance squad handle the arrests. Quick. But the bigger cases were a little trickier, had him under longer.

Didn’t really make much difference to Ray, he could play a part as long as they needed, but Stella hated it, hated him disappearing for days at a time - though she could talk, it was her long hours working at the State’s Attorney’s Office that’d made him say yes to the assignments in the first place - hated the booze and the cigarettes that usually came with the gigs, and hated the scruffy, bad-boy look that he’d cultivated for years that she used to love. They’d fight whenever he got off an assignment, make up in the bedroom, then she’d get on another big case and vanish into her work again and he’d do the same. Rinse and repeat.

It was an ugly cycle, but it only really got bad when something went wrong on a job. He’d had his cover blown a few times, usually because somebody up the chain hadn’t done their homework properly, sent him in with bad intel. One of those incidents earned him a bullet wound and a citation, and Stella wouldn’t talk to him without screaming or crying for a week. He’d saved that kid though, and eventually she forgave him.

This time though, he didn’t know how she was gonna forgive him for this, if he even made it out of this clusterfuck of a situation alive.

Wasn’t even his damn fault. Nobody’d known Grimaldi was a shifter and they sure as shit hadn’t known that their snitch had blown Ray’s cover in exchange for a chance at the Bite. Ray’d walked into an ambush and he only had his instincts to thank for the fact that he was still breathing, instead of lying on the ground with his throat ripped out.

‘Course, that outcome was very much still on the table as he crouched behind a stack of rusted oil drums, clutching at his gun, blood dripping from his shaking right arm, the sounds of snarling and fighting animals growing louder and closer every second.

The sudden piercing howl of sirens converging on the warehouse then was music to Ray’s ears. _Thank fuck._ Somebody’d heard the gunshots and his backup was on the way.

It was getting really hard to think clearly and his vision kept blurring and going grey at the edges on him. Ray blinked, and shook his head, wobbling a little as he tried to catch his balance with his uninjured arm. His hand slipped in the blood smeared there and he toppled forward to his knees, his gun skittering out of his hand and across the concrete floor. _Shit. Shit. Not good. Fuck._

There was a click of canine toenails on cement to his left and the last thing Ray remembered was looking up to see a pair of glowing amber eyes staring at him.

-

When he came to, he was alive - _alive!_ \- and in the hospital and there was a doctor somewhere nearby saying, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Kowalski, but in situations like this, the likelihood of conversion is nearly one hundred percent. There have only ever been a handful of reported instances wherein an individual receiving immediate treatment was able to fight off the infection and recover without contracting lycanthropy. We’ve done all we can, and while we won’t know for certain until all of the bloodwork comes back, he’s already exhibiting symptoms consistent with a positive Bite.”

He was unconscious again before he heard what Stella had to say in reply.

-

Ray’d had a shit attention span _before_ he could hear the high pitched hum of every computer monitor, television, or fluorescent light in his vicinity or smell in excruciating detail the soupy mix of sweat, stale coffee, floor wax, cigarettes, laundry detergent, soap, deodorant, cologne, piss, dried blood, and vomit that filled the air at your typical police station. Now, it’s like everything’s shouting at him, all the time, and he can’t keep anything straight in his head. Still fucking near-sighted too, but hey, he could see in the dark now, for all the good that did him.

The hospital hooked him up with a ‘conversion counsellor’ to talk to him about ‘adaptive strategies in the face of a life-changing diagnosis’ and give him a useless goddamn pamphlet titled ‘Lycanthropy and You: Shifting Priorities’ and the CPD made him go see a shrink. Neither were much help; not being shifters themselves, they had no real idea what he was going through.

Because that’s what Ray was now, a _fucking shifter_.

That first month - well, first couple weeks before the full moon, really - was the hardest. Senses dialed up to eleven, and this constant crawling itch, feeling like he was made of glass and rocks all grinding up inside him, he had to take meds just to get through the day; they’d given him a prescription for something at the hospital that took the edge off, but with his changing metabolism, the effects wore off pretty quickly.

It made him feel like he could explode out of his skin at any minute. Which, by the way, was a legitimate concern now, like, that was a thing that was _absolutely going to happen to him_. Every day that passed was a day closer to losing himself entirely. The moon would rise, and bam! No more Ray Kowalski, human detective guy. Total obliteration of self to an extent that even his most difficult and intense undercover roles hadn’t meant.

He was put on desk duty until the shrink and the shooting board cleared him, but he was pretty much useless for the duration. Nobody at the station would look him in the eye, they’d all heard what had happened, and even the ones who didn’t have a bug up their ass about shifters felt sorry for him.

People feeling sorry for you smelled different. That was a fun discovery. He looked it up, because that sounded like bullshit paranoia-brain talk when he thought about it more, and it turned out that maybe what he was smelling was stress hormones subtly changing people’s scents. Not totally his imagination then. Still sucked.

Stella went with him that first full moon, smelling like anxiety and that perfume he’d bought her for their anniversary one year and now kinda gave him a headache, but he didn’t want to make things worse and hurt her feelings by telling her not to wear it.

They’d rented this tiny cabin in Wisconsin, a seriously out of the way place where he could be reasonably sure that he wouldn’t be near any other people after he Changed. Stella stayed inside the cabin, watching him through the window as he stripped naked and paced, waiting for the moon to rise and take everything from him.

It hurt. Less than he was expecting maybe, but it still hurt.

The pamphlet had talked about ‘transitional discomfort’ and other euphemisms for ‘your entire body is going to reshape itself on a fundamental level in a matter of minutes, good luck with that’. It didn’t mention how fucking weird it felt to be in the passenger seat while your body scrambled itself like a twisty pretzel and then put the parts back together a different way. If it weren’t for the gut-chilling fear leading up to it and the slow-motion car accident pain of bones and muscles doing things they really shouldn’t be able to, it might’ve actually been kind of cool, Ray thought.

The actual, being-a-wolf portion of the process was pretty okay, considering. He had a tail, that was new, and if he thought the whole smelling things situation was intense before, he had no idea.

He felt jazzed, electric, hyped-up like that one time he’d been under and a girl had slipped him some cocaine in a club and he’d spent the whole night buzzing. This night was no different, and he followed his nose deeper into the forest and then had to walk three quarters of a mile back to the cabin barefoot and naked in the morning when he woke up human-shaped again.

He’d survived. Ray Kowalski hadn’t been swallowed up by the wolf after all. Or at least, he’d come out again on the other side.

Too bad it didn’t get any fucking easier after that.

-

That feeling like you were gonna split your skin thing never really went away. Even before the bite, Ray could have kind of a hair trigger, he knew that and he tried to keep a lid on it most of the time, but now it seemed like everything set him off. He was approved for return to full duty by the skin of his teeth and within six months he’d been written up four times.

The meds they’d originally given him didn’t do shit for him anymore, so he’d gotten them to give him something stronger and then started drinking on top of it, just to make the pills last longer. It was stupid, and was probably gonna get him fired if he kept it up, but he didn’t know what else to do. It was the only way he could drown everything out enough to think.

Stella kicked him out three months in. Said she wasn’t going to stand by and watch him self-destruct, if that’s what he was determined to do.

He begged her to let him stay. Went cold turkey on the booze and meds for two weeks trying to prove to her that he could make it right.

It didn’t change her mind and he ended up putting a hole in the wall of interrogation room three at the station with his fist. Lieutenant Cortez sent him home for two days, unpaid, and Ray spent the next forty-eight hours trying to get blind drunk and puking his guts out in the tiny, shitty motel room he’d been staying at.

Things sorta took a downward spiral from there.

-

Ray’s always been a clingy bastard, and stalking your ex after she sends you divorce papers isn’t a good look for anyone, so when they offered him the Vecchio gig, it was kind of a godsend.

“What’s the catch?” he’d asked. They told him, “Your partner’s Canadian, also a shifter, but Vecchio’s a born wolf, so there’s the family to contend with too; should be fine as long as you keep your head down and play it cool.”

And to be honest, Ray was so sick of himself by that point that all he heard was maybe he’d get a chance to ask somebody who’d been living with this shit longer than he had how they managed it and he forgot to ask about anything else.

You should always read the fine print before you sign anything. He’d been married to a lawyer, you’d think he’d have remembered that.

-

Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP was absolutely nothing like Ray was expecting. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting exactly, but whatever it was, it wasn’t what he got, tall and movie-star handsome, dressed in a fire engine red coat.

Ray was supposed to be playing the guy’s best friend, so he’d hugged him straight-off and it was like trying to cozy up to a brick wall, the guy was so solid. Smelled real good too, like warm wool, pine trees, woodsmoke, and whatever that not-quite-regular-human scent was that he’d started recognizing meant he was looking at another shifter. Thing was though, the guy was absolutely certifiable.

Before Ray knew it, they were swept up in some insane business involving revenge-seeking performance arsonists from Vecchio’s past coming out of the woodwork, and apparently nobody’d bothered to properly brief the Mountie on who Ray was or what was up with Vecchio’s disappearing act.

They got it all sorted out in the end, but not before Ray did something stupid and took a slug to the chest. Good thing he was still operating on old habits and had a vest on, otherwise the recovery might’ve been a lot more gruesome than a nasty bruise that healed a few minutes later. That was one perk of this whole shifter stuff that Ray didn’t mind, even if he did have to carb load like when he’d been boxing and trying to go up a weight class all the time now.

After that, he and Fraser just sorta clicked. It was weird. Ray’d had friends as a kid, and even after his complete personal meltdown with the bite and the divorce there were still a few guys that Ray was kinda friendly with, not that he was in a position to hang out with them while he was under as Vecchio, but still. Fraser was a whole different kettle of wax.

They’d wrapped the Garbo case and grabbed dinner afterwards, and the next time he saw the guy, he’d practically told him his whole life story. Zero to sixty, strangers to buddies in two seconds flat.

So when Fraser asked him to go running with him, night of the full moon, what did Ray say? “Sure, Frase, what time did you want me to pick you up?”

He didn’t stop to think that this meant being alone in the woods with a naked Benton Fraser and what that might do to their brand-new partnership. By the time this thought did occur to him, it was too late, and Fraser was taking his pants off, and Ray was _not_ going to make this weird for himself or Fraser, he was not.

So he stripped off his own clothes like it was no big deal and they got on with the whole painful business of shape-shifting and wolfing around and hey, turns out it’s pretty cool having a buddy to do this with.

The morning after felt a little awkward at first, if only because, see above, Ray’s kind of a clingy bastard, especially in his sleep, and accidentally gave Fraser the full octopus treatment, but Fraser didn’t seem to mind, so Ray wasn’t gonna be stupid enough to try to talk about it and just got up to go get dressed instead.

-

Not talking about it worked great, until it didn’t.

They’d been humming along for a few months using that strategy, solving cases left and right, and Ray was starting to feel like maybe he was finally figuring out how to function without Stella or the meds or the booze, and then the next thing Ray knew, he was having it out with Fraser in full view of half the fucking precinct.

It was a full-on shouting match, like Fraser never lets himself get with anybody else, and Ray realizing that he’s had it up to _here_ with the guy always having to be right, not listening to Ray, not _trusting_ Ray to have his back, and that’s just not buddies. Fraser might _think_ he’s the alpha wolf in this little pack-thing they’ve got going, but that ain’t how this works. This was gonna be an equal partnership or none at all.

So Ray warned him. And then he decked him, because - of course - Fraser didn’t listen. And then he felt like shit, because jeez, what the hell was wrong with him that he’s hitting _Fraser_ of all people? That’s like kicking a dog, all insensitive shifter jokes aside. Way to fuck up, Kowalski.

He made Fraser hit him back, which ought to have made things even, but somehow it really didn’t, and they agreed to take the transfers that had been offered to them and go their separate ways, which just made Ray feel even shittier, even if it was for the best maybe.

Neither of them expected the pirate.

-

Fast forward seventy-two hours of absolute mayhem and entirely too much lake water later, and Ray wasn’t sure how his life had come to involve freighters doing double-duty as ghost ships or Mounties with naval power fantasies or hinky underwater rescue breathing techniques, but he was sure that Fraser was still his partner, and neither of them were going anywhere.

-

Here’s the thing about not talking about stuff - as a general life strategy, it sucks, but man is it easy to fall back into.

Ray and Fraser had been doing the partnership thing for nearly a year now. They were like a finely tuned engine, sitting pretty in the sweet spot of the power band, cruisin' down the road, eating up the highway miles - this metaphor was getting away from Ray a little, but y'know what he means. He and Fraser were good.

Ray was surprisingly good.

His folks were back in Illinois from Arizona and he and his dad were actually kind of talking again.

They took the news about him getting bitten surprisingly well, considering they were still being a bit weird with him about the divorce - his mom and Stella still talked regularly - but they didn’t really discuss it much beyond him having to remind his mom why he was going out of town every month. She’s still not real clear on the fact that the full moon thing wasn’t something he could just reschedule if it’s inconvenient for him.

The most his dad ever said to him about the lycanthropy was, “it’s a hell of a thing, son” over a couple of beers one night while they were tinkering with the GTO, which wasn’t much, but it was a lot better than an ‘I told you so’ or another ‘no son of mine’ speech. He’d take it.

Meanwhile, the Vecchios had done their best to adopt him into their pack, which was a different kind of weird, but not a bad weird, really. He liked them, on the whole, it’s just awkward being at the house when he knows his presence is a constant reminder that the real Ray Vecchio isn’t there with them, so mostly he just stuck with Fraser.

And that ‘sticking with Fraser’ part was where he’d gotten himself into a bit of trouble, because Ray’d maybe let himself get a little more… attached to Fraser than he should have.

Like, it was becoming a _problem_ , attached.

Ray wasn’t exactly the best at setting boundaries for himself, when it came to people he cared about. Sure, he was good at undercover, like he’d said, good at setting up that mental wall between himself and the person he was pretending to be, but Ray wasn’t really pretending to be anything other than himself, while he was being Vecchio, if that made any sense.

He was Ray Vecchio in name only, because the only folks he interacted with didn’t really want him to _be_ Vecchio, they just wanted him to keep the real guy safe, and he could do that well enough as himself; it’s not like anyone who really knew Vecchio before was gonna buy that this skinny blond guy in jeans and shitkicker boots was the same man as the smooth-talking Italian he’d replaced. That was what was so nuts about this assignment. It didn’t make any damn sense to begin with.

But there were still certain things he had to remember while he was being-but-not-being Ray Vecchio.

One of them was that Frannie was his sister - he’d managed to get his brain to go along with him on that one, even though, hot damn, Frannie was a looker, and she could get it, if only she’d stop moping after the Mountie and find some guy decent enough to give her a look back, you know? But yeah, a year into this mess, and Frannie was one hundred percent off the table, he was her big brother now and she was the bratty little sister he’d never had.

The other thing was that the Mountie was off-limits. Do not pass 'Go', do not collect two hundred dollars, off-limits. That one was getting harder and harder to remember.

Especially when, once every twenty-nine days or so, he spent roughly eight hours getting naked and running around the woods with the man. Their monthly rise-and-shine, octopus routine hadn’t gotten any less naked or uh… hands-on since that first time. And it’s getting real _hard_ for Ray to pretend those mornings aren’t his favorite part of this whole confusing situation.

Last couple months, he’d been trying to keep his hands to himself by using Dief as his substitute canine snuggle buddy when he bedded down, but that didn’t do him much good, because then it was Fraser initiating the full-body, good-morning-from-behind, all-purpose cling and Ray just can’t take any more, okay? He’s only human - _only shifter?_ \- there’s only so much temptation a man can resist before he breaks.

So when he felt Fraser press closer to him one post-lunar morning and put his mouth to Ray’s throat with intent, all Ray could think of in that moment was, _thank fuck_ , and promptly rolled over to do exactly what he’d been telling himself he wasn’t going to do for months now. It was probably still a very bad idea - yeah, he knew - Ray may be damaged, but he wasn't stupid. They’d already crossed the line they weren’t supposed to cross though, so he might as well enjoy it, worry about the consequences later.

It was good.

They didn’t talk about it.

It was good the next time they did it too.

-

The Mountie was good at not talking about things. Really good. Better than Ray even, and he’d been doing it semi-professionally for _years_. But Fraser - because Fraser and the Mountie weren’t quite the same, not really - was an _expert_ at not talking about things.

(And shouldn’t Ray be calling him Benton now? Or Ben maybe? If you were kinda sorta doing somebody on the regular, wasn’t that quasi-official grounds for first-name usage, in your head at least, if not out loud?)

Ben - nope, too weird, can’t do it yet - _Fraser_ was so good at Not Talking, he made it seem like the whole thing wasn’t happening at all. Like it was maybe just a figment of Ray’s imagination that he knew what the guy’s abs tasted like (kinda salty, but nice, for the record). Ray wasn’t sure how he should interpret that.

Nothing else between them had changed, if anything they were better than ever working together, but then get them alone, riding that post-shift, ‘everything is naked and nothing hurts’ high and suddenly they couldn’t keep their hands and mouths and other interesting parts off each other.

It seemed pretty obvious that Fraser was into it when they were getting physical, but Ray couldn’t get a bead on whether the occasional roll in the pine needles was all he was after, or if he was just too shy to come out and ask for more because that would mean admitting he experienced feelings like a normal person. Maybe he thought that this was all Ray wanted and he was just following Ray’s lead? Or maybe he thought if he waited him out, Ray would crack first and he wouldn’t have to risk putting himself out there.

The obvious solution to all this confusion would’ve been for Ray to just ask Fraser himself, but then Ray was always a stubborn asshole too, not to mention insecure as fuck (yeah he knew it, even if he didn’t like admitting it), so that wasn’t gonna happen any time soon. Things were good as-is for now. He could afford to let it ride for a while longer. Ray was getting laid for the first time in over a year, he was feeling magnu- magma- magnanimous.

-

Fucking Vecchio.

Ray was finally, really starting to feel good about his life, about himself, and his thing that wasn’t quite a thing, but maybe it was a forever-type thing with Fraser, and then fucking Ray-goddamn-Vecchio had to turn up in Chicago again and ruin everything.

And it’s not like Vecchio was a bad guy, hell, Ray might even like him if he stopped calling Ray ‘Stanley’, but it was what he represented, what he brought to Chicago with him. Ray'd thought he'd been facing total obliteration of self when he’d been bitten? _Oh boy._ Not even close.

With Ray Vecchio came Holloway Muldoon, and Canada, and getting thrown out of airplanes, and dog sledding without actual dogs, and fucking submarines _again_ , and the end of Ray’s life as he knew it, because all of that meant one thing - Fraser was gonna leave him.

And it was stupid, Ray was stupid if he ever thought for a moment that he could keep Fraser to himself in Chicago forever. He’d been flying high, living that lie for far too long, and now he was gonna have to face the music.

Skinny Polish werewolf detectives with experimental hair were no match for the majesty and beauty that was Canada, eh.

He tried not to let himself say that out loud, at least not where Fraser might overhear him. Bad enough that he had it bad for the guy, it’d be worse if he made him feel like shit for wanting to go back home where he belonged. Ray would just have to deal with it.

And then Fraser came into the small tent that the Mounties had set up for them, looking a little wild-eyed and out of breath, and kissed the hell out of Ray.

And everything was greatness.

**Author's Note:**

> What did you do today? I wrote angsty due South werewolf fic and am publishing it before I can think better of the idea, because apparently that's what my brain wanted to see happen today. I don't even know. This was kinda cathartic to write, angry!RayK is a mood right now. 
> 
> Comments are love. Thank you for reading!


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